Motivational Quotes

Happiness

To describe happiness is to diminish it.

- Stendhal, Henri B.

Best Quotes about Happiness

Happiness isn't something you experience; it's something you remember.

Oscar Levant

We think a happy life consists in tranquility of mind.

Cicero, Marcus T.

The secret to happiness is not in doing what one likes to do, but in liking what one has to do.

Happiness is not being pained in body or troubled in mind.

Jefferson, Thomas

The greatest happiness is to know the source of unhappiness.

Dostoevsky, Fyodor

A good way I know to find happiness, is to not bore a hole to fit the plug.

Billings, Josh

The foolish man seeks happiness in the distance, the wise grows it under his feet.

James Oppenheim

Gaiety --a quality of ordinary men. Genius always presupposes some disorder in the machine.

Diderot, Denis

A great obstacle to happiness is to expect too much happiness.

Fontenelle, Bernard Le Bovier

10.

Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.

Abraham Lincoln

11.

A man is happy so long as he chooses to be happy and nothing can stop him.

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

12.

Call no man unhappy until he is married.

Socrates

13.

Point me out the happy man and I will point you out either egotism, selfishness, evil --or else an absolute ignorance.

Greene, Graham

14.

The highest happiness of man is to have probed what is knowable and quietly to revere what is unknowable.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

15.

To have joy one must share it. Happiness was born a twin.

Byron, Lord

16.

No thoroughly occupied man was ever yet very miserable.

Landon, Letitia Elizabeth

17.

Happiness is a butterfly, which, when pursued, is always just beyond your grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel

18.

This is the best kind of voyeurism, hearing joy from your neighbors.

Chuck Sigars

19.

To be happy in this world, especially when youth is past, it is necessary to feel oneself not merely an isolated individual whose day will soon be over, but part of the stream of life slowing on from the first germ to the remote and unknown future.

Russell, Bertrand

20.

Men expect that religion should cost them no pains, that happiness should drop into their laps without any design and endeavor on their part, and that, after they have done what they please while they live, God should snatch them up to heaven when they die. But though the commandments of God be not grievous, yet it is fit to let men know that they are not thus easy.

Tillotson, John

21.

If happiness is activity in accordance with excellence, it is reasonable that it should be in accordance with the highest excellence.

Aristotle

22.

Happiness is an imaginary condition, formerly often attributed by the living to the dead, now usually attributed by adults to children, and by children to adults.

Szasz, Thomas

23.

A person will be just about as happy as they make up their minds to be.

Lincoln, Abraham

24.

The pursuit of happiness is the chase of a life time.

25.

Happiness is perfume, you can't pour it on somebody else without getting a few drops on yourself

Zee, James Van Der

26.

The Greeks said grandly in their tragic phrase, Let no one be called happy till his death; to which I would add, Let no one, till his death be called unhappy.

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

27.

Remember that happiness is a way of travel - not a destination.

Roy M. Goodman

28.

Happiness is not a reward -- it is a consequence. Suffering is not a punishment -- it is a result.

Ingersoll, Robert Green

29.

The final moment of success is often no more thrilling than taking off a heavy backpack at the end of a long hike. If you went on the hike only to feel that pleasure, you are a fool. Yet people sometimes do just this. They work hard at a task and expect some special euphoria at the end. But when they achieve success and find only moderate and short-lived pleasure, they ask is that all there is? They devalue their accomplishments as a striving after wind. We can call this the progress principle: Pleasure comes more from making progress toward goals than from achieving them.

Jonathan Haidt

30.

Look up, laugh loud, talk big, keep the color in your cheek and the fire in your eye, adorn your person, maintain your health, your beauty and your animal spirits.

Hazlitt, William

31.

Happiness is the absence of the striving for happiness.

Chuang Tzu

32.

There are two ways of being happy: We must either diminish our wants or augment our means -- either may do -- the result is the same and it is for each man to decide for himself and to do that which happens to be easier.

Franklin, Benjamin

33.

Where one is wise two are happy.

Proverb

34.

Do you want my one-word secret of happiness -- It's growth -- mental, financial, you name it.

Geneen, Harold S.

35.

IÆve decided that the key to happiness is low expectations.

Laura Moncur

36.

We tend to forget that happiness doesn't come as a result of getting something we don't have, but rather of recognizing and appreciating what we do have.

Koenig, Frederick

37.

Happiness is a ball after which we run wherever it rolls, and we push it with our feet when it stops.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

38.

Happiness is the only good. The time to be happy is now. The place to be happy is here. The way to be happy is to make others so.

Ingersoll, Robert Green

39.

Happiness is the light on the water. The water is cold and dark and deep.

Maxwell, William

40.

If we cannot live so as to be happy, let us so live as to deserve happiness.

Fichte, Johann G.

41.

It is in the compelling zest of high adventure and of victory, and in creative action, that man finds his supreme joys.

Saint-Exupery, Antoine De

42.

No man is happy; he is at best fortunate.

Solon

43.

Happiness lies in being privileged to work hard for long hours in doing whatever you think is worth doing. One man may find happiness in supporting a wife and children. Another may find it in robbing banks. Still another may labor mightily for years in pursuing pure research with no discernible result. Note the individual and subjective nature of each case. No two are alike and there is no reason to expect them to be. Each man or woman must find for himself or herself that occupation in which hard work and long hours make him or her happy. Contrariwise, if you are looking for shorter hours and longer vacations and early retirement, you are in the wrong job. Perhaps you need to take up bank robbing. Or geeking in a sideshow. Or even politics.

Heinlein, Robert

44.

Happiness is not a goal, it is a by-product.

Roosevelt, Eleanor

45.

Work and live to serve others, to leave the world a little better than you found it and garner for yourself as much peace of mind as you can. This is happiness.

Sarnoff, David

46.

Success is getting and achieving what you want. Happiness is wanting and being content with what you get.

Meltzer, Bernard

47.

Unhappiness is best defined as the difference between our talents and our expectations.

Bono, Edward De

48.

The search for happiness is one of the chief sources of unhappiness.

Hoffer, Eric

49.

Happiness was not made to be boasted, but enjoyed. Therefore tho others count me miserable, I will not believe them if I know and feel myself to be happy; nor fear them.

Traherne, Thomas

50.

The foolish man seeks happiness in the distance; The wise grows it under his feet.

Oppenheimer, Julius Robert